Education; Lessons

By Edward B. Fiske

Published: September 28, 1988

Arthur Wise remembers vividly how his Great Idea came to him, because he was in bed at the time. It was the spring of 1964, and Mr. Wise was a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Chicago trying to come up with a quick and dirty topic for a term paper.

''At the time,'' he said, ''I was studying two things, the Warren Court and how public schools are financed, and suddenly it hit me. I'll bet the way we pay for public schools would probably be declared unconstitutional.''

Truly original ideas are as rare in education as they are in other fields of human endeavor. Rarer still is the one that finds that right combination of theorists and advocates to transform it into a revolutionary force.

Mr. Wise's idea - that property taxes are an unfair way to pay for public schools, because they give an edge to districts with high real-estate values - qualifies on both counts. The eight-page term paper led to a book, ''Rich Schools, Poor Schools,'' which became the basis of a movement to reform school finance that, through a series of suits in the 70's, forced dozens of states to overhaul their school financing.

The movement began sputtering in the early 80's, partly because many of its goals had been achieved and partly because the country's attention had turned from equity to academic quality. Now, however, equity seems to be making a comeback.

Last month, an administrative law judge in New Jersey ruled that the state's method of distributing school money was constitutionally flawed. Parallel decisions have come down in Texas, Kentucky and Montana.

It would be a mistake, though, to view the flurry of court cases as a carbon copy of what went before. The events of the last eight years, notably the growing concern for the quality of schools, have substantially muddied the waters.

Disparities resulting from heavy reliance on property taxes to pay for schools are well documented. Last year in New Jersey, for example, Princeton spent more than $7,000 per pupil; Camden came up with $4,500.

The standard remedy has been for states to increase their contribution to local districts, with the bulk of the new money going to the poorer districts. Since the early 70's, the average state share has increased, from less than 40 percent to more than half.

Much of the credit for the shift goes to a network of scholars, public-interest lawyers and others who took the theories of Mr. Wise and another scholar, Jack Coombs, and forged them into a national campaign. They came to be informally known as the Jim Kelly Mafia, after the Ford Foundation program officer who, along with the National Institute of Education and the Carnegie Corporation, supplied the necessary grants.

In retrospect, both the issue and the solution in the 70's were elegant in their simplicity, at least on the theoretical level. The problem was a lack of money to make schools in property-poor districts competitive, so all you had to do was send them some.

Recent efforts by state leaders to improve academic quality have, however, complicated the issue. Many states have begun offering financial incentives to districts that find ways to raise students' test scores. That sounds fine. But if the new money is available to wealthy as well as poor districts, then it could end up improving education for the state as a whole, but widening the spending gap between rich and poor.

There is also a fundamental philosophical difference between the movements for financial equity and educational quality. The school-finance reformers have focused on adequate resources. They assume that, if poor districts can just get enough money, effective teaching will automatically follow.

By contrast, the educational-quality movement of the last few years has focused on results. It has imposed tests and established rigorous standards. How school districts, especially poor ones, will help students achieve has not been a major topic of debate.

Legislators and others are no longer willing to assume that just giving poor districts more money will make things O.K. They understand that the distribution of the money can affect educational outcomes.

In Minnesota, parents are allowed to choose the school their children will attend, and if they go to a neighboring district, they can take their state aid with them. That can be readily defended on the ground that by stimulating competition among schools, the state will prod teachers and principals into doing better jobs. But if the child moves from a poor district to a wealthy one, the gains could be achieved at the cost of widening the resource gap between the districts.

In the past, once state financing systems were declared unconstitutional, the major political problem was to come up with more money for poor schools. Now politicians face the additional task of reconciling the sometimes conflicting goals of equity and quality.

The president of the Education Commission of the States, Frank Newman, sees the situation as comparable to changes in the school-improvement movement, which has progressed from such simple steps as requiring more academic courses for a high school diploma to such complex issues as how to improve teacher education. ''We've done the easy things,'' he said. ''Now we've got to tackle the hard ones.''

Maybe it is time for Mr. Wise, now a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, to crawl back into bed and dream up some new ideas.